Let's Get It Straight, Hank Paulsen Is a Prick Who Took Down the Economy

By Matt Taibbi, True/Slant. Posted June 9, 2009.

"Hank Paulson is a national hero. I said it last October and I'm sticking by it. And now, there's actual evidence to back me up. The TARP bailout worked. The Wall Street crisis is over." -- by Evan Newmark from "Mean Street: It's Time to Enshrine Hank Paulson as National Hero" -- Wall Street Journal.

So here's the letter I wrote to the Wall Street Journal after reading Evan Newmark's paean to Hank Paulson last week:

Dear WSJ,

Just out of curiosity -- did Evan Newmark ever work for Goldman, Sachs? And if the answer to the question is yes, don't you think that might have been a good fact to disclose before he fellated Hank Paulson in his "Mean Street" column?

Sincerely,
Matt Taibbi

Can you imagine what a craven, bumlicking ass-goblin you'd have to be to get a job working for the Wall Street Journal, not mention up front that you used to be a Goldman, Sachs managing director, and then write a lengthy article calling your former boss a "national hero" -- in the middle of a sweeping financial crisis, one in which half the world is in a panic and the unemployment rate just hit a 25-year high? Behavior like this, you usually don't see it outside prison trusties who spend their evenings shining the guards' boots. I can't even think of a political press secretary who would sink that low. Hank Paulson, a hero? Are you fucking kidding us?

Exactly what part of Paulson's record is heroic, Evan? The part where he called up SEC director William Donaldson in 2004 and quietly arranged to get the state to drop capital requirements for the country's top five investment banks? You remember that business, right, Evan? Your hero Paulson met with Donaldson and got the rules changed so that Goldman and four other banks no longer had to abide by the old restrictions that forced banks to actually have a dollar or two on hand for every ten or so they lent out. After that, it was party time! Bear Stearns in just a few years had a debt-to-equity ration of 33-1! Lehman's went to 32-1. By an amazing coincidence, both of these companies exploded just a few years after that meeting, and all of the rest of us, Evan, ended up footing the bill, thanks to a state-sponsored rescue of Bear and a much larger massive bailout of Wall Street in general, necessitated in large part by the damage caused by the chaos surrounding Lehman's collapse.

Meanwhile your own Goldman, Sachs ended up with a 22:1 debt-to-equity ratio a few years following that meeting, a number that would have been much higher if one didn't count the hedges Goldman bought through a company called AIG. Thanks in large part to Paulson's leadership in his last years as head of Goldman, the company was so massively over-leveraged that it would have gone under if AIG -- which owed Goldman billions when it went into its death spiral last September -- had been allowed to collapse. But thanks to Hank Paulson, who heroically stepped in and gave AIG $80 billion the same weekend he allowed one of Goldman's last key competitors, Lehman, to collapse, Goldman didn't have to go without that money; $13 billion of the AIG bailout went straight to Goldman. So I guess we have Paulson to thank for the fact that he used about $13 billion of our taxpayer money to essentially bail out his own fuckups. I mean, that's heroism if I've ever seen it. Audie Murphy has nothing on that. Sit your asses back down, Harriet Tubman, Thomas More, Gandhi and Jesus Christ. Hank Paulson is in the house!

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Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

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